Maybe Grace could go to Aunt Ethel, invent a husband who’s dead in the war, and there’s no shortage of those. Some invention it would have to be, though, for Aunt Ethel’s the sort who’s too interested, asks questions like the schoolmistress she is. No, the only other place Grace could go is to one of those homes for unmarried mothers who have nobody to give their babies to. And they’re not places anybody would want to be.
Sometimes Grace even thinks through what if she left Baby; she can’t say they don’t care for him here. All the food he could eat and more. In the evenings Mrs Blunt sits stitching for him, and the needle could be going through Grace, the more for Grace hasn’t a needle or cotton to sew for him herself. There’s the farm, too. It would all be Baby’s, so long as they think he is Robert’s. Maybe Grace mustn’t think of herself but what’s best for him, and she’s not a thing to offer. But her insides are turned out of her at the thought. She’d never be able to smell a thing but for his sweetness, and what would her cheeks feel if they were pressed against an empty pillow at night. It only takes a second’s more thought to remember that the Blunts are March mad. Grace could never leave Baby with them, not even with all he might get. Why, they might coo over him now but who’s to say it wouldn’t be him barred in next?
Still, some wicked days she wishes he hadn’t been born yet. If it
weren’t for Baby, she’d still be back at Park Lane, waiting for Joseph to come home. Then her taste turns sour, and she thinks she’ll fry for that thought. Though she’ll be frying anyway for what she’s already done, all of it, for God’s not merciful any more, they all know that. Even a vicar must stumble over those words in the service. Though Grace hasn’t been let near a church.
Grace wonders what Mrs Blunt’ll do with Grace when Baby’s big enough to need to run around outside more, for that’s when Grace could take him. Grace looks at how he is walking, and counts the months before Mrs Blunt will have to let him out of reach. Maybe they’ll lock Grace up whenever Baby is playing out there, but Mrs Blunt is still talking as though Robert’s coming home. ‘Them telegrams are wrong half the time,’ she says, and repeats the story she read in the newspaper of the boy who came home to find his name already up on the church wall. ‘You’d’ve thought them in charge don’t have an idea what’s going on out there.’ Though she can’t believe it, Grace keeps mum. For so long as Mrs Blunt thinks Robert’s coming home, she’ll keep Grace and Baby well for him.
Grace is sitting at breakfast and Mrs Blunt is talking again about how Robert might have been lost and could still be found: taken prisoner, joined another regiment, become confused. Grace is all nerves because now the war’s over, it’ll be clear soon, won’t it, that Robert is none of these things, and she so wants Mrs Blunt to go on believing Robert is coming that her mouth goes off of its own accord. ‘Perhaps,’ she says, for it’s all she can think of doing at the moment, ‘perhaps he might have just run away.’
As soon as she’s said it, she realises what she’s done, but it’s too late to catch the words back again. Mr Blunt lifts his head and stares straight at her with eyes that look as though the colour’s washed out of them, and his hands twitch up.
Better be dead than a deserter; or the parents of one.
*
Mrs Blunt has hung black about her photograph of Robert, and yesterday she said that Baby is their memory of Robert. It’s how he’s come back to us. Almost as fast as Grace can think, something has changed. Grace can see it in the way Mr Blunt looks at her sideways long and hard till she catches his eye and he turns away. Clear as day, now that the Blunts have decided Robert’s not coming back, Grace is just in their way.
Grace has to leave with Baby, and she’s no time for pride any more. She’ll have to ask for help wherever she can, and that’s from the one person she’s told herself she could never go to. As little as Grace might not be able to open her eyes for the shame of it, and there’s not a chance he’d let her keep Baby, he would at least give Baby a future. Not send him to the workhouse as a bastard child. And now, now there’s a chance he’d be allowed the time to come and find the two of them.
He would never forgive her, and Grace wants to weep at the thought he’ll know how she’s let him down. So long as he didn’t know she could pretend that he loved her still. But she has to put Baby first. Even if she might as well put a knife in her gut as she hands him over to Michael, and he asks her to leave.
She slips two pieces of paper and envelopes from Mrs Blunt’s desk, pen too. And stamps. Hides them under her pillow for when she goes up at night. It’s only when the wall is rattling from Mr Blunt’s snoring, and Baby’s breath is soft and deep, that Grace slides them out. She lights the candle, whispering a prayer that nothing will bring either of the Blunts out of their room. And she writes.
It’s so long since she’s written that she scarce knows how to move her hand across the page, and what’ll Michael make of a scrawl like that. Still, she’s no paper to spare, for she has to write twice. One to the old lodgings, just in case. One to the service address – there’s a hope they’ll find him. She’s not thinking about where else he might be.
She writes to come and find her, that she’s been trapped here, not able to send a letter out before, and she needs him to look after
her now. We’ll be a family, she writes. That’s not telling him so much he won’t come, she thinks, but he won’t be able to say that she lied to him.
Next morning she’s out the far end of the field and down to the road to catch the postman as he passes. She stands in the middle of the road and waves him down like there’s an accident around the corner. He has to pull the horse up so sharp that its hooves are near on Grace’s chest.
She’s still enough of a smile on her to get a nod and wink back. And a promise not to tell the Blunts, as it’s for a surprise, and who would want to ruin it? As the cart rattles off, Grace sends a prayer with it. Please God, she begs, if you’ll still listen to me, send me Michael. Then you can do what you want with me.
26
IT’S EVEN RAINING INSIDE, THINKS BEA. THE
restaurant’s windows have steamed up, and small droplets are beginning to run down the panes, streaking the view of Piccadilly. She looks back across the table at Bill Fitzroy, all pale brown hair and reasonable, well, quite attractive, blue eyes fixed on her intently. A little too intently. She should perhaps not have kissed him ten days ago.
Last week, last week she was liable to kissing. The day after Mother’s funeral, she drove the Calcott to Pimlico, her stomach turning with embarrassment and excitement and a heave of memories, not all of which she wished she had. The house looked as grey on the outside as she’d remembered it being inside. The door was answered by a short, wide-shouldered woman with dyed black hair piled up into a bun on the top of her head. Below, the skin on her face sagged from wartime rations. The woman looked her up and down. Mr Campbell, she said, dear, you’re not his sister, are you? He only left word for her, didn’t mention anybody else. He’s one of the ones that hasn’t been back for over a year, dear. Bea’s head whirred, of all the things she’d been steeling herself for, this had not been one, the dread of him no longer wanting her drowning out that possibility.
She took the tea offered. Don’t be silly, she told herself, of course
he isn’t dead. To her, though, he was perhaps as good as, for he had not even thought that she might have wanted to find him.
A couple of days later, her head still spinning, and fired up by half a bottle of champagne, she had, extremely willingly, kissed Bill Fitzroy.
Since then there have been two bunches of flowers and three calls. The first two calls, mercifully, she was out. On the third, she’d been running downstairs, practically buttoning her coat as late as ever. This time for the family solicitor, for Bea has been left to supervise the sinking of the ship. Clemmie has retreated to Gowden and the half-baked Tom, Edie’s little Archie scooped up under her arm. I wanted another, she said, and I don’t think I’ll be getting one out of Tom. Thus Bea has been left to pack away the world they grew up in.
What then? VAD nursing will trickle on for a while, for the wounded don’t recover the moment the bells ring. However, it will end soon and Lauderdale Mansions has been empty since the war began. Now there’s the vote at thirty, Emmeline has retreated. The Women’s Party in the election last year was such a damp squib that she, Mrs Pankhurst that is, is going to lecture abroad. This Celeste despises. ‘Damn fickle woman, should have spotted it a mile off. Come on, Beatrice, are you really going to wait another five years for the ballot? You might even miss the next General Election.’ Bea’s not sure how much she cares any more. It’s a detail, a fingernail compared to everything else that has happened since the war began. She’s almost back to where she was beforehand, floating along between social engagements with Celeste trying to stir her up to something.
Bea leans back, taking her elbows off the restaurant table and mistakenly letting her bad hand fall on to the tablecloth in front of her. Before she can withdraw it, Bill’s one remaining hand is on hers. His other wrist hovers below the table top. He has managed quite well to keep it out of sight, which has only made her the more curious. She has grown used to trying not to gaze at the
injuries that pass on the street. Some, the legs, or rather lack of legs, she can hardly bear to see. It’s the powerlessness, she thinks, on a body that is otherwise so strong.
‘Beatrice,’ begins Bill, and Bea feels a prod of panic. It is clearly a ‘begins’ and she somewhat dreads where he is going next. He can’t be going to, is he soft in the head, a touch of what Tom has? She thought it was just Bill’s hand that he’d not come back with. She wants to say Good God, is that the time, but they’ve not even been there an hour and are somewhere between the main course and pudding – which they went for instead of a starter. Won’t lunch, thinks Bea, become inconveniently long when rationing ends and they can stuff themselves on three courses in the middle of the day again?
She interrupts, stop him, Beatrice, dead in his tracks. ‘Bill?’
‘Yes.’ His eyes light up. Hell.
‘Will you excuse me?’ She picks up her purse and winds her way through the tables towards a glass door leading into the hallway. As she enters the hallway, she steps around the ladder of the man recruited to de-fog the windows and thinks that, were she with someone she wanted to be with, she would have rather liked the fogged glass to cut her off from the world outside. But everything familiar to Bea seems to be falling apart in a way it wasn’t during the war. Is that another reason why she kissed Bill? To take herself back to the old days? He was a face from that past, and she might have kissed him then.
There’s also that glaring word being muttered around all the dregs of drawing rooms in town. Shortage. Good God, it’s so tasteless, like the harvest was poor while the other harvest, over there, was so damn rich. Take what you can, says Clemmie, who is all for accepting a spontaneous proposal. And in the absence of Mother, Bea finds that she is behaving in just the manner that, out of pure stubbornness, she refused to do when Mother was around. She is contemplating marriage for the hell of it because Mother may just have been right when she said life is easier with a husband; however
little you are in love with them, at least then nobody thinks you are looking, especially if you are twenty-five.
Bea glances through the now cleared window and stops stockstill. Looking back in and straight at her is a face she recognises. It stares at her hard for a second or two, then turns and walks away quickly.
Her ribcage is squeezing into itself and she’s catching her breath. It’s like that image of Edward she caught in the yellow drawing room. It can’t really be Mr Campbell, can it? Not walking down Piccadilly at half past one in the afternoon. And what are the chances he’d be back so soon? Unless, like the others, he’s on a brief leave before going back to clear up the mess. Mind you, stretcher-bearers, all they have to do now is help those who can still travel return home. Mr Campbell, no, Michael. Her anger at herself makes her feel sick. But would she not just do the same thing again? No, she could still slip away from the shining bars of marriage and country-house life that she is but half a dozen words from right now, and do something quite different, couldn’t she? But it was a ghost, wasn’t it, a figment of her imagination appearing at the final hour, just in time to make her realise she might have a choice.
She rushes to the door and out into the street. That bowler hat and trench coat, thick young neck between, is ahead of her but moving away fast. It is damp and chilly and she hasn’t a coat, and she’s left poor one-handed Fitzroy to wonder whether she’s quite well, but she’s trotting to keep up. She needs to trot faster, all he’ll have to do is vanish into the crowd at Piccadilly Circus and she’ll have lost him. Ahead there’s a small crowd blocking his way and he stalls to step aside. It’s long enough, and her hand reaches his sleeve, as she gasps for lack of breath.
‘Michael!’
He stops, turns and looks straight at her as though she’s a bridge away.
‘Miss Masters,’ he says.
Lead pie in her stomach. Miss Masters? Where’s the ‘Beatrice’
that he asked to call her last time they met? Does he hate her that much? His eyes are pitch-dark enough to make her run. Stand your ground, Beatrice. If he goes now, then he’s gone.
She’s been through this moment in her head more times than anyone can count. Next time, next time, this is what I’ll say, she told herself, but now there are no words there for her.
He’s talking, though. How funny, it always used to be her who spoke more.
‘Not like a lady to run down the street.’
Bea finds herself shaking her head. No, she says. Not like a lady.
‘Shouldn’t you be returning to your lunch companion?’
Damn you, Michael Campbell, she wants to say. You’re so damn ungentlemanly – but the Bills of this world dull in comparison. Does he realise that the angrier he is, the more determined it makes her to stay?